From - Sun Oct 04 09:06:22 1998
From: Ragnar Fyri <ragnar.fyri@daf.no>
To: myrla@kef.net, ragnar.fyri@daf.no, sfox@funtv.com, josefcub@usa.net,
        tigra@lionking.org, Jamzhart@aol.com, Talbain@ix.netcom.com,
        sfox80@juno.com, gyroplast@wtal.de
Date: Sun, 04 Oct 1998 08:23:19 +0100
Subject: Pets

'Twas the night before 27-Sep-98, and all through the net,
 not a creature was stirring, except for Myrla, who whispered ominously:

>> 6. Pets are allowed.
>> 
>> Uh, I think you have to set a prop to ban them and since I set everything
>> in my test room allowed...

>I've often wondered about this one.. what would be the purpose of
>banning a pet?

Good question... The only place I know where they are banned is a game room
on Furry.  I guess the purpose there is to make it impossible for a player
to play more than one position (Like you couldn't do that with an alt...)

Or should I say 'knew'? I tred experimenting a bit and discovered this:
The first time you choose option 6 in Editroom it creates a new prop called
pets_allowed? and sets it to 'no'. Next time it sets it to 'yes'.
So,is the default 'yes'? Well, maybe! It depends. Le me explain...
On a pretty early stage, I created a puppet for the purpose of carrying a
public action. Because it could not follow me around then, I set up a
couple of actions for summoning it and sending it away. Because I wanted
to change some settings whenever the puppet left and arrived, I made a
couple of macros so I could summon and dismiss the puppet with a single
keystroke. And since I was setting up macros anyway, I added a command to
each of them to turn the puppet off before dismissing it and turn it on
after summoning it - this of course is to avoid getting spammed with
unnecessary room descriptions.
Sowhat? It doesn't work any more, that's what! Whenever I summon the puppet
now, I get the message "Sorry, pets are not allowed!" and it gets moved to
my inventory. Okay, I guess I could get around the problem in this particular
case by changing my Summon macro to e.g. @teleporting the puppet into the
room and then letting is fake a normal arrival with a couple of poses
(Sietrack: Have you ever tried to fake a departure by typing ":teleports
away" and ":has left"? ;)), but that is just treating the symptoms of the
real problem (It's a problem?), which is: Pets (which seems to mean puppets
which are not zombies,  at least in this case) _are_ banned by deault!
I don't know what the solution may be, it could be as simple as setting
pets_allowed?:yes in Room Zero...

Talking of Room Zero, I (a plain mortal) have been there! I tried using
the @open program to make some exits, and either I did something wrong or
the program isn't functioning as advertised - the result was a door leading
to Room Zero! (Relax, I recycled it again after testing it - I got curious
after Gyro told me about all the actions listed there, but my mortal eyes
only saw a couple of characters and objects lying around. (What were they
doing there anyway??))

-- 
We'll be right back after these messages.